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Subtle Subversion: An Analysis of Female Desire in the Works of Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Griffith and Sophia Lee
NOELIA SÁNCHEZ CAMPOS
PhD Thesis In English Studies
Subtle Subversion: An Analysis of Female Desire in the Works of Frances
Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Griffith and Sophia Lee
Candidate: Supervisor:
NOELIA SÁNCHEZ CAMPOS DR DAVID OWEN
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Department of English and German
2017
Subtle Subversion: An Analysis of Female Desire in the Works of Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Griffith and Sophia Lee
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements...5
A: OVERVIEW 1. Introduction
1.1. The Framework of the
Study...7 1.2. Thesis
question...13 1.3. Primary Sources... ...15
B: HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONTEXT
2. The Development of the Image of Woman Throughout the Long Eighteenth Century 2.1. The Sacrificing Woman: A Noble Act or a Sign of Entrapment... ...17 2.2. Women Writers’ Tradition: The Figure of the Heroine...22 2.3. The Epistolary Genre: Women Writers and the Creation of a Female
Community... ...26 2.4. Resisting the Proper Lady Configuration: The Image of the Female
Trickster...34 2.5. The Demand to Set an Example: Morality and Didacticism in Fiction...42 2.6. Facing Limitations: Heroines’ Struggle to Transcend their Enclosed
State...46 2.7. The Self-Conscious Female Narrator: Towards an Authentic Representation of the Female Self...49 2.8. The Paradox of the Desirability of Female Virtue: The Importance of
Conventional Notions of
Womanhood...52 2.9. Depicting Unconventional Women: The Implications behind the Femme
Fatale
Figure...55
C: CONTENT ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 3. Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph
3.1. Virtue Under Threat: The Ambiguities around the Female
Body...59 3.1.1. The Importance of the True Self: Depicting the ‘Good’
Woman...63 3.1.2. The Influence of the Richardsonian Model: Is Virtue
Rewarded?...67 3.2. The Seduction Narrative ...74
3.2.1. The Unceasing Pattern of Seduction Stories: Much more than Cautionary
Narratives...76 3.2.2. The Model of Amatory Fiction Established by Aphra Behn,
Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood: Sheridan’s Feminist Stance...79
3.3. An Exploration of the Feminine Boundaries of Modesty...92 3.3.1. The Flourishing of Conduct Literature: Delineating Women’s
‘desirable’
Qualities...93 3.3.2. Public vs. Private: Dismantling the Division into Separate
Spheres...100 3.3.3. Matriarchal Narratives: Achieving Power through
Submission...104 3.3.4. Women of Quality: Conflicting Perceptions Regarding Women’s
Role...107
4. Frances Brooke’s The History of Lady Julia Mandeville
4.1. The Desiring Female: The Figure of Lady Anne Wilmot as an Unconventional
Narrator...114 4.1.1. Female Transgression and its Consequences...114 4.1.2. Widening Conduct Literature: Courtship Novels and the Harlot’s
Progress...119 4.1.3. The Search for a ‘True’ Female Account: Tensions between
Representation and Experience...124 4.1.4. Proper Female Behaviour: Privacy as a Psychological
‘Refuge’... 129 4.2. Struggling with
Passion...133 4.2.1. The Intense Power of Feeling... 133
4.2.2. Representing the
Passions...136 4.2.3. Rationalizing the Passions: The Need for Self-Regulation...139 4.3. The
Masquerade...141 4.3.1. Defining the Masquerade: A Multi-Faceted
Genre...141 4.3.2. Masquerade and the Shaping of Identity: Psychoanalytical
Perspectives...146 4.3.3. The Mask as an Unsettling Symbol: Hindering Social
Stability...148
5. Elizabeth Griffith’s The Delicate Distress
5.1. Marriage and Adultery: Cultural and Literary
Representations...152 5.1.1. Marriage: An Unnarratable
theme?...155 5.1.2. Marital Life: The Impact of the Sexual Double
Standard...157 5.1.3. Advice Literature: Towards an Idealised
Marriage...164 5.1.4. Adultery: Linguistic and Semantic
Connotations...166 5.1.4.1. Narrating Adultery: The Destabilisation of the
Family...167 5.2. Towards a Feminine Utopia: Women’s Education and the Movement away
from the Image of the
Temptress...171 5.2.1. The Feminine as Spiritual: Gardens as Metaphysical
Retreats...175 5.2.2. The Idealisation of the Family: Women as Guarantors of
Virtue...178 5.2.3. Negotiating between Subordination and Independence:
Matriarchal and Egalitarian
Narratives...182 5.3. Constructing the Heroine: The Tensions between Feminine
Disempowerment and Feminine
Agency...185 5.3.1. A Threat to the Family Unit: The Image of the Femme
Fatale...187
6. Sophia Lee’s The Recess
6.1. History vs. Fiction: Which is more
Influential?...196 6.1.1. Defining Historical Fiction: A Multifaceted
Genre...197 6.1.2. Sophia Lee’s The Recess: A Historical
Tale?...201 6.1.3. Multiple Female Voices: The Unreliability of the
Narrator...203 6.1.4. Retelling of History: Breaking the Barrier between History and
Fiction...205 6.2. Female
Gothic...213 6.2.1. The Emergence of the
Gothic...213 6.2.2. Gothic
Readings...214 6.2.3. The Female
Gothic...221 6.2.4. (Re)Examining the Role of Sensibility and the Domestic
Sphere...224 6.3. Isolation, Abjection and the
Uncanny...230 6.3.1. Women’s Studies and Psychoanalysis: The
Uncanny...230 6.3.2. Repression and the Power of
Visions...234 6.3.3. Melancholia and
Abjection...238 6.4. The Disappearing Act of the Mother
Figure...241 6.4.1. The Mother/Daughter Bond: The Departure of the ‘Good’
Mother...246
7. Conclusions and
Consequences...256 8. Further
Research...266 9. Bibliography...270
5
Acknowledgements
I heartily thank my supervisor Dr David Owen for his unconditional support and encouragement. This thesis would not have been possible without his constant, invaluable and detailed guidance. His commitment to my work has been unfailing. I thank him for allowing me to find my own critical voice and for helping me develop my research skills throughout the process of writing this thesis.
Special thanks also go to Professor Andrew Monnickendam, Dr Carme Font and Dr Joan Curbet for their insightful feedback and their bibliographical references. I am thankful for the remarkable support that they have always showed to my project In Dr Joan Curbet’s case, I also wish to thank him for agreeing to sit on my PhD tribunal. I would also like to express my appreciation to Dr John Stone and Dr Laurie Kaplan for agreeing to be part of my PhD tribunal.
Throughout the PhD programme, I have attended two of BSECS conferences (Venice 2014, Barcelona 2016) and a Juvenilia Press Conference (2015), all of which have been tremendously enriching experiences which have given me the chance me to share some aspects of my thesis with fellow researchers and exchange some views with them.
Additionally, I am also thankful for having had the opportunity to work with Dr Alexandra Prunean and Reyhane Vadidar together with our my supervisor Dr David Owen on our editing project promoted by Emeritus Professor Christine Alexander at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and director and general editor of the Juvenilia Press. In this project we had the chance to write a critical introduction and annotate the first edition of Hannah More’s A Search After Happiness, which proved to be an immensely gratifying experience as it allowed us to learn how the editorial process works as well as to complement our own research.
6 Last but not least, on a personal note, I would also like to express my gratitude to my family and friends for their steady and immeasurable moral support and understanding. They have always encouraged me and have supported my thesis project from the very beginning.
7 A: OVERVIEW
1. Introduction
1.1. The Framework of the Study
The general purpose of this study is to enquire into the ways in which the
‘woman question’ was approached by lesser-known late eighteenth-century women writers. The main objective of my research is to detect the discourse of desire produced by the women writers I have selected, Frances Sheridan, Frances Brooke, Elizabeth Griffith and Sophia Lee, to determine its characteristics and to assess its possible aims. I focus particularly on the extent to which these writers incorporate in their work certain widespread traditions and conventions regarding women’s role and expectations and also, crucially, the ways in which these writers resist such marked parameters.
The notion of desire is fundamental in my analysis. In my thesis, I understand female desire not simply in the modern sense of the term, with its obvious focus on the sexual aspect of such area, but rather as women’s eagerness to comprehend their own situation and to attempt to surpass certain limitations. Desire, thus, becomes inextricably linked to a personal quest, a movement towards self-recognition, towards the attainment of a knowledge of one’s self which would endow the female individual with a certain level of narrative authority, of control over her own representation.
In Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), Nancy Armstrong notes this personal dimension of desire by arguing that:
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Foucault has observed, the discovery of the fact of desire hidden within the individual prompted an extensive process of
8 verbalization that effectively displaced an eroticism that had been located on the surface of the body” (Armstrong 1987: int 12)
Armstrong acknowledges the presence of a kind of desire that goes beyond the
“surface of the body”, a desire that is not merely a representation of an erotic, physical response but rather is that which remains concealed, trapped within the individual. In this respect, Armstrong identifies “conflicts within the female character, between her innate desires and the role she was destined to occupy” (1987: 253). Desire becomes associated with an interior battle with oneself, a battle to reconcile one’s own intimate desires to societal pressures and demands.
Within this inner struggle that desire entails, the power of discourse, that is the ways in which desire can be expressed either verbally or subliminally, becomes essential. Linda Kauffman’s Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (1988) sheds some light into this by pointing out the difficulties that the female lover encounters: “the female lover is frequently regarded merely as a madwoman, frigid and furious. No system of discourse seriously considers her suffering, her passion, or the range and resourcefulness of her imaginative powers” (1988: 245-6).
This difficulty to accurately depict the discourse of the figure of the female lover is very much felt in the narratives I have included in this thesis. The female who actively expresses desire, especially the desire to attain agency, such as Lady Anne Wilmot and the marchioness, are portrayed as ‘unruly’ characters whose discourse is approached with certain apprehension, as they embody an unapologetic refusal to comply with the expectation that they deflect their desires and this positions them as
‘unruly’ characters whose discourse is somehow ‘dangerous’.
The representation of an ‘authentic’ female self, not simply the reproduction of an idealised, ‘perfect’ standard of womanhood, is a central preoccupation in all the texts
9 I have included in this thesis. All of these texts allow for an exploration of the female experience by their depiction of diverse female characters, some of which remain traditional and conventional embodiments of what was socially deemed ‘appropriate’
female behaviour whereas others actively resist such social control and instead embody a disruption of such social expectations by their utter refusal to comply with what is expected from them. The tensions and points of conflict which are created around conventional and non-conventional female characters opens up the way for a deep exploration of the sense of female community created around these female figures, a community in which the struggle between acceptance and dissent is very much felt.
Authenticity, then, gains a centrality in the quest for ‘real’ female representation, for a representation of the female self that includes her most intimate longings, urges and desires. In Women’s Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (2003) Alessa Johns brings forward the conviction that female utopias ought not to be based on “political upheaval”
(2006: int 16) but rather on a personal quest and, hence, there is a suggestion that reform needs to come from personal connections. In this thesis, I align myself with this line of thought, as in the texts under analysis the creation of female communities to bring attention to the need for social reform is largely based on a personal level, located within the female individual herself.
Narrative authority, directly derived from this concern with ‘authentic’
reproductions of the female self, is yet another term that acquires a special significance in my study. By narrative authority I refer to the female character’s ability to assume control over their own circumstances, through narrative agency, instead of simply becoming a mere spectator of their own lives, with no degree of agency whatsoever over it. In my thesis I argue that the female authors I have included in my analysis do indeed accord their female characters with narrative authority and what becomes
10 interesting, then, is the evaluation of what those female characters do with that level of authority and of the ways in which they profit from such ‘active’ endowment of
‘influence’.
Female desire and the ‘woman question’ have been analysed in great depth and have been the subject of study in the long eighteenth century and beyond. Most studies largely rely on binary oppositions between good and ‘bad’ women, between angelic, perfectly submissive female individuals as opposed to ‘demonic’, ‘fallen’ heroines which somehow deviate from the established (and desired) ‘right’ path of virtue.
Throughout these studies, there is a sense of polarisation between these two extremes, which are taken as opposing each other. As Critics such as Vivien Jones and Ingrid Tague have noted in Women and Literature in Britain: 1700-1800 (2000) and in Women of Quality: Accepting and Contesting Ideals of Femininity in England, 1690-1760 (2002), respectively, such binary oppositions fail to fully categorise women, which prompts the necessary dismantling of such oppositions.
In my thesis, I propose that such contradictory portrayals of womanhood, the good versus the ‘bad woman’, the ‘complaisant’ versus the unruly female, are not as separate as one might presume and can be taken as complementary representations, each of which provide essential information about the other in an intertwining manner.
In the present thesis I follow the line of thought that establishes that binary oppositions, which were frequently used when depicting women in fiction and also in non-fictional accounts such as conduct books, are somehow too straightforward to be effective and that any comprehensive approach to femininity must question such oppositions and attempt to reconcile them.
Despite the broad scope of critical material on women writers and on womanhood in general, the level of narrative authority that female characters are
11 accorded by their authors has not to-date received the critical attention it deserves. Such narrative authority becomes essential to detect the level of complaisance these characters actually exhibit to their own subjection and also to determine the amount of agency that they are permitted to exert in light of the limitations that surround them. In this respect, the present thesis hopes to make an innovative, significant contribution in this field and to interrogate established parameters concerning women’s assumed role so as to shed some light as to the ways in which female characters responded to (and struggled with) their ‘fettered’ state.
In light of this, my thesis aims at detecting the extent to which these women writers depict female characters who desire to resist the strict configuration of the
‘proper’ woman and, especially, the purpose that lies behind that resistance. It also aims to propose that those women writers depict apparently conventional female characters who achieve a significant amount of self-command.
In the main chapters, several conventional frameworks are closely analysed, in order to detect the effect that such traditional configurations play in the narratives under discussion. One of these aspects is the well-established notion of female virtue in distress, given novelistic impetus by Samuel Richardson and continued by later novelists, Frances Sheridan included. Amatory fiction is yet another significant tradition which is evaluated. This tradition creates a complicated dynamics in which the role women play in seduction becomes crucial. The notion of female modesty and the extent to which extreme display of modesty is actually ‘desirable’ are also considered.
The present thesis interrogates general assumptions about family life1 – and its implications for women – and also, most importantly, in its suspicious analysis of the
1 As I argue in chapter 5, in The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747-1800 (2009) Katherine Binhammer notes Elizabeth’s Griffith’s interrogation of family life though her resistance to the demand for strict adherence to duty within marriage. In The Delicate Distress, Lady Woodville, though fulfilling the role of a suibmissive wife, nevertheless questions certain regulations concerning wifely duty.
12 figure of the ‘heroine, women’s cultural and social depictions and the disorderly components inherent in femme fatale figures.
As I will fully indicate in chapter 2, mainstream, powerful literary traditions, such as Historical Fiction and the Female Gothic, are also examined. Some elements of psychoanalytical thought, such as Freud’s notion of the uncanny or Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection, are used to determine the ways in which Psychoanalysis sheds light into certain literary tropes. Maternal absence is yet another traditional framework which is used to detect the effects such prominent and continuous literary trope has on the narratives.
Studies prior to the 1970s are not directly associated to the themes I will explore in this thesis and, hence, my critical evaluation starts in the late 1970s, a period in which Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s influential Madwoman in the Attic (1979) introduces the suspicion that women writers’, in order to submit to the demand for their submissiveness and selflessness, must ‘murder’ their own, true identity so as to fulfil the role of angelic women.
The 1980s introduced a careful scrutiny of the tremendous pressure exerted on women to comply with certain social and cultural expectations, which is highlighted in Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987). This decade witnessed a flourishing interest around the figure of the heroine.
Within women’s preoccupation to give a voice to their most intimate urges, many women writers made use of the double-heroine formula to explore different sides of womanhood. Societal pressures that women found themselves subject to and the ways in which they responded to such pressures has also attracted a considerable amount of critical attention.
13 In the 1990s and the 2000s, an increasing interest in the passions was observed.
The various constraints that women writers ought to face when producing their work continued to attract a significant amount of attention. The notion of female virtue still retains a prominent role in literary criticism. Recent critics have turned their attention to the considerable amount of desirability that is generated around the very notion of virtue. The intense uneasiness generated around female transgression – and its consequences – continues to occupy a fundamental position in recent criticism, as shown in Malgorzata Luczynska-Holdys’ Soft-Shed Kisses: Re-visioning the Femme Fatale in English Poetry of the 19th Century (2013).
1.2. Thesis Question
In light of the above review, it is apparent that no study to date focuses closely on the accordance of authority in order to challenge and undermine expected submissiveness and that my critical space has space for development. Therefore, my research addresses this question and makes the following enquiries: To what extent are these female characters, despite the submissiveness socially expected and conventionally required of them, accorded narrative authority by their authors?
Do they show that ‘desire’ to seek and assume control over their own circumstances?
To determine this, my thesis is organised as follows. The second chapter provides the historical and conceptual context of my study. The overview I have outlined in this first, introductory section will be thoroughly analysed in my second chapter so as to establish the social, cultural and political context within which my thesis is embedded,
14 by outlining the major works and critics that have delved upon the tropes and concerns that are central for my research purposes.
My third chapter approaches Frances Sheridan’s Memoir’s of Miss Sidney Bidulph from different perspectives. The first of these if the fundamental notion of virtue in distress, which was assumed by Sheridan and used to highlight femininity’s highly mysterious, indefinite nature. Another tradition that is examined in this chapter is that of amatory fiction, paying special attention to the ways in which Sheridan’s appropriating of amatory conventions interrogates the role women play in the repetitive pattern of seduction. A final tradition that is considered is female modesty, which proves to be problematic in Sheridan’s narrative, especially when exceedingly endorsed.
My fourth chapter examines the ways in which Frances Brooke incorporates certain traditions and conventional perspectives in her novel The History of Julia Mandeville, including the notion of female transgression, the nature of what was termed ‘the passions’ and the public assembly of the masquerade. All of this conventions will be used to detect whether they are used to define the female experience or to obscure and further complicate such female representation.
My fifth chapter considers the theme of the family unit in Elizabeth Griffith’s The Delicate Distress. This chapter reflects on eighteenth-century widespread assumptions concerning marriage and adultery and also concerning the figure of the heroine, with a special emphasis placed on the disruptive force that fatal women have on both family live and the construction of the heroine. All of these elements will be inspected so as to assess Griffith’s stance on the ‘woman question’ and, crucially, on the tensions generated between different female personas, from ‘natural’, subordinate women to disruptive, transgressive ones.
15 My sixth and final chapter analyses the influence of influential literary traditions, such as Historical Fiction and the Female Gothic, by focusing on those elements from these traditions that Lee appropriates to suit her narrative interests. In this final chapter I also make use of elements from psychoanalytical thought, including Freud’s notion of the uncanny and Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection and isolation, so as to detect the ways in which psychoanalysis can provide a richer understanding of Lee’s text. In this final chapter I have also included the trope of the absent mother in order to determine the significance such absence has in the text. This is followed by my conclusions and consequences, further research sections, and the thesis bibliography.
1.3. Primary Sources
The primary sources I have selected for this study are the following: Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761), Frances Brooke’s The History of Lady Julia Mandeville (1763), Elizabeth Griffith’s The Delicate Distress (1769) and Sophia Lee’s The Recess (1783).
In my thesis, these female authors are, first, analysed separately in the main chapters, with their focus on particular conventional parameters which are applicable to each of the texts and, later, are all discussed together in the conclusions section, with its evaluation of how these women writers all responded to the main concerns raised in this study.
My criteria selection is based on the fact that these women are writing for the same public at the same time and broadly reflecting similar ideas. I detect in their work a similarity in the notion of desire. In their narratives, there is a shared attempt to shed some light into women’s responses to their expected role. Thematically, they are also
16 linked by their willingness to accord some agency to their female characters. These women writers provided their own, particular stance on women’s position and focused on a variety of themes, all of which are of extreme importance to my research purposes and introduce crucial elements that must be evaluated so as to gain a fuller comprehension of these women writers’ responses to conventional notions of womanhood, especially to the widely-accepted notion of the ‘proper’ woman.
17 B: HISTORICAL AND CONCEPTUAL CONTEXT
1. The Development of the Image of Woman throughout the Long Eighteenth Century
This section contains an overview of critical responses to those concepts that will remain at the centre of this thesis, including an assessment of the marked binary oppositions through which women were categorised, and the responses to the widely- established figure of the ‘proper’ woman configuration as well as its possible alternative representations, through other less ‘desirable’ female figures, such as female tricksters, femme fatales and unconventional, disorderly women.
This conceptual chapter is organised chronologically as well as thematically, and it includes subheadings that delineate the various themes under discussion.
2.1 The Sacrificing Woman: A Noble Act or a Sign of Entrapment?
In the later decades, from the 1980s onwards, there was a burgeoning interest around notions of femininity and how women were represented through fictional and non-fictional accounts. Yet, this is not the case in the 1970s, where I begin my critical analysis. Throughout the 1970s, though such concern around the notion of womanhood was certainly noted, many of the critical works do not delve into the notions in which I centre my analysis. Thus, I have selected a couple of critical works from the late 1970s, which are relevant to my research purposes.
In the late 1970s, Gilbert and Gubar’s authoritative study The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) reinforced the sense of uneasiness associated to the ideal image of woman of a submissive, selfless creature. Specifically, they highlighted the fact that, in order to
18 surrender themselves to the fulfilment of this angelic role, women must to a certain extent ‘murder’ their true identity so as to conceal it. It is worth noting that, in their analysis, Gilbert and Gubar do not introduce this sacrifice as necessary but rather as something which produces “a life of death, a death-in-life” (1979: 25).
Hence, in their examination they signal that by becoming self-sacrificing, women are not only displaying their noble attributes but they are also somehow
‘condemning’ themselves to death, trapped in a life in which they can’t produce any story or, at least, they find themselves unable to show the story they would produce if they allowed to reveal their true desires and longings. This secrecy to which women’s true identity is inevitably linked is intriguing. Forced to play a role in the public eye, their true self remains locked away, waiting to be released.
Gilbert and Gubar rightly point that despite the fact that recent feminist analysis has highlighted encouraging role models one should not overlook the “terrible odds against which a creative female subculture was established” (1979: 51). The women writers which are analysed in this thesis all had to find ways to come to terms which such terrible odds and I totally agree with Gilbert and Gubar’s claim that only by recognising the problems these women writers had to face will be able to fully appreciate the extent of their literary achievement.
In the Madwoman in the Attic one reflects on the remarkable inconsistency that surrounded the female persona in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because of the tremendous pressure on women to display a certain public image of themselves, duplicity was inescapable but, as Gilbert and Gubar affirm, such duplicity is to be taken as hopeful, since it allows women to “create themselves as characters” (1979: 51) and, thus, to explore the multiple possibilities behind their role, however limiting these might appear.
19 With regards to the texts that will be discussed in this thesis, Nancy Chodorow’s The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (1979) made significant contributions to our understanding of Sophia Lee’s The Recess.
Specifically, Chodorow’s analysis of the trope of mothering brings to light the fact that such noteworthy trope, in spite of its tremendous importance in both familial and non- familial settings, has been seldom explored in fiction.
When approaching the figure of the mother, especially women’s longing to (re)connect with her, relying on psychoanalytical thought becomes imperative. The way women build relationships with their mother is taken to be a cyclical process in which Chodorow identifies mothers’ eagerness to “produce daughters with mothering capacities and the desire to mother” (1979: int 7). Such eagerness is crucial in Lee’s narrative, as we will see, and it comes to place as an irrepressible force, an inescapable urge to both connect with the mother and take an active part in the act of mothering itself.
Chodorow affirms that women acquire the capacity for mothering “through the developmental situation in which they grow up, and in which women have mothered them” (1979: 39). Yet, in The Recess such mothering education never takes place, as this figure of the mother-mentor is never found. Such maternal absence, and the absence of the education that comes with this maternal figure, is denied to the protagonists of this story, with the subsequent emotional shortages that this lack entails.
In the light of this maternal loss, Chodorow correctly predicts that women develop strong affective ties with other women so as to fulfil those needs that traditionally a mother figure would fulfil. In The Recess this proves to be the case, as female friendship is the crucial element that somehow makes up for maternal
20 disappearance. Only be building – and maintaining – relations with other women, can the female protagonists of Lee’s narrative satisfy their affective (maternal) needs.
In the 1980s, Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987) identified the multiple conflicts that arose within the female character, as she struggled to reconcile her own, inner, repressed desires to the social role that she was set to engage. Armstrong reflected on the numerous areas that surrounded such inner conflict, including economic, social and cultural dimensions.
From an economic perspective, it became clear that even the most ambitious woman would aspire to achieving “the economic dependency upon the man who valued her for her qualities of mind” (Armstrong 1987: 49). In the social realm, Armstrong notes that for women the acquisition of ‘power’, of some sort of authority, is not achieved by seeking her own desires but rather by “redeeming the male” (1987: 55).
The impression that arises from such remarks is indeed that women’s desires, in all areas of their lives, is irrevocably determined by male prerogative and hence the conviction that only by fulfilling male’s desires can women fulfil their own became prevalent in the period.
Consequently, as Armstrong notes, endless conduct books proliferated in the long eighteenth century, all of which perpetuated the idea that women’s behaviour ought to be carefully monitored if they were to gain male acceptance. Such conduct material, predominantly written by male authors, perpetuated the design that women ought to display certain attributes and behaviours if they were to become eligible wives, as Armstrong clearly sentences:
In their effort to make young women desirable to men of a good social position, countless conduct books and works of instruction for women represented a specific
21 configuration of sexual features as those of the only appropriate women for men at all levels of society to want as a wife” (1987: 59)
Such pressure to become the perfect embodiment of ‘desirable’ feminine qualities was very much felt by eighteenth-century young women, and so much so that it become absolutely clear that women who did not display such idealised characteristics would be regarded with suspicion, with a sense that she is not ‘proper’
or, at least, not properly ‘feminine’. This pressure to embody ‘desirable’, ‘proper’, feminine qualities lies at the very centre of my research purpose, as my thesis question aims precisely at detecting the extent to which the female characters of the texts under analysis surpass expectations and assume narrative authority.
In this respect, Armstrong’s views on women’s subordination parallel the claims that had been made in the 70s by Gilbert and Gubar, which I discussed earlier, regarding women’s relegation to a death-in-life. Armstrong appears to share this vision by observing that “middle-class respectability doomed the woman to a kind of half-life within society because by definition respectability required her sexual repression”
(1987: 165).
This concern is a crucial one, as it brings to light the realization that women’s submissive role may not be the willingly accepted role that conduct material and fictional accounts endorse but rather a socially imposed position that most woman resigned to but not without some degree of resistance.
Armstrong makes use of Brönte’s heroines to exemplify this divergence between what society inculcates and what one truly desires, as the Bröntes typically portray heroines who “desire the one man whom society forbids them to marry, giving rise to the notion that social conventions are, in an essential way, opposed to individual desire”
(1987: 193). This opposition between society and the self is tremendously significant in
22 my reading of the texts that will be analysed in this thesis, as such opposition signals women’s defiance, however limited, to their socially prescribed role.
2.2. Women Writers’ Tradition: The Figure of the Heroine
Throughout the 1980s, the figure of the heroine was subject to constant evaluation. Eva Figes Sex and Subterfuge: Women writers to 1850 (1982) delved into women writer’s employment of alternate ‘heroines’ so as to express women’s imperfections and their anxieties about their prescribed role without ‘betraying’ the essence that was demanded from a heroine. As Figes notes, women writers showed “a tendency to become didactic in order to justify their activity” (Figes 1982: 22). Their primary aim was to instruct, to educate their audience, especially young women, and to do so they ought to shun any sign of imperfection from the heroines of their tales, as to turn them into perfect models to imitate.
In The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen (1984), Mary Poovey provides a thorough analysis of the societal demands to which young women were subject to. In her study one can note the extent to which such societal expectations delimited the ways in which women writers approached the subject of femininity in their work. As Poovey rightly points out, women’s value was measured in accordance to her ability to be a submissive, passive creature.
Yet, this angelic figure is ‘shadowed’ by the continuous presence of her sexuality. Female sexuality was taken to be voracious, almost incontrollable, and this prompted the concern to carefully monitor women’s sexual appetites so as to keep them under control.
23 This relation between women’s angelic nature and the constant threat of their incontrollable sexuality was paradoxical, as Poovey notes “the middle-class code of propriety defined women exclusively in terms of their sexuality and demanded that their every public action deny that sexuality” (1984: 110). The reconciliation of these two elements was achieved by the desexualisation of women’s “real sexuality in highly euphemistic expressions” (1984: 110).
Once again, deviousness was the means to express women’s supposedly voracious nature; it appears that only through indirection can their true identity be revealed. The same can be applied to the expression of female power. As Schofield notes, such expression “must manifest itself indirectly in order to be effective” (1986:
139), as any overt female attempt to seize authority would be interpreted as a defiant act and, hence, would not help her attain some ‘power’ but rather place her in a suspicious position from which any attempt to obtain some control would prove ineffective.
Anne Schofield’s Fetter’d or Free: British Women Novelists 1670-1815 (1986) introduces the conviction that women novelists, embedded within domestic settings, nonetheless struggled to find alternative ways to express their concerns and hence “seek to find a more realistic device for representing emotion than the hyperbolic language of sentimental drama” (1986: 95).
Within their domestic portrayals, most leading women novelists of the eighteenth century were “very aware of the trivialization of women” (Schofield 1986:
187) and it was precisely this awareness that prompted them to find ways to voice their uneasiness and thus to “give urgent and meaningful expression to their female consciousness” (Schofield 1986: 216).
Hence, it was becoming clear that certain areas were not permitted for women to analyse and, moreover, in the case that women writers wished to express some sort of
24 resistance to their society’s system of beliefs they found themselves obliged to do so only indirectly, by making use of “strategies of deviousness, using artistic devices which voice their unease without obviously challenging literary or sexual conventions”
(Monteith 1986: 154).
Within this conspicuous tension between societal pressures and individual desires, in The Eighteenth Century Feminist Mind (1987), Alice Browne notes that women writers, subject to higher demands than their male counterparts, became increasingly aware of the existence of a tradition they could call their own; which created a sense of a feminine tradition in which they could embed their work. This obviously augmented the possibilities women writers could benefit from but still limited tended to limit them “feminine genres” (Browne 1987: 27), as their production was expected to revolve around familial and domestic settings, which were believed to pertain a to a ‘feminine’ realm, in which women could find some expression for their concerns.
A way to achieve such expression was, as Browne notes, by making use of the double-heroine formula. As there were certain expectations with regards to the role of the heroine of the story, women writers found it difficult to embed their heroines with certain qualities which, though perhaps closer to the ‘real’ eighteenth century woman, were not appropriate for a heroine. Hence, it became clear that “if one heroine carries the love plot, the other has more scope to develop other characteristics which might not suit a love story heroine” (Browne 1987: 75). Thus, though the heroine was the one that carries the weight of the story, other less idealised women that surrounded her carried a story of their own, a parallel story that was not separate from that of the heroine but rather an exploration of its alternate – and crucial –possibilities.
25 Linda Kauffman’s Discourses of Desire: Gender, Genre, and Epistolary Fictions (1988) also revolves around the double-heroine formula by pointing out that any female attitude that deviated from expected modes of behaviour was viewed as suspicious, especially in fiction, in which the figure of the passionate woman was one to be wary about and “frequently regarded merely as a madwoman, frigid and furious”
(1988: 245-6). This same idea is reinforced by Spencer, who observes that “the woman who felt sexual desire was shown to be a devil” (1986: 119), which highlights the sense that passionate, desiring females were never placed at the centre of the narrative, and hence their stories were systematically ignored, placed aside so as not to be accused of
‘impropriety’.
In English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789-1830 (1988), Gary Kelly brings forward the pressures to which women writers were subject to, which forced them to indirectly express their uneasiness with certain prevailing conventions. In their work one can observe a perceptible mistrust of the social, since in such narratives young women repeatedly find themselves intimidated by male persecutors as they find themselves struggling “to negotiate the various languages of social beings and identity”
(1988: 43), all of which are full of ambiguities and contractions that they need to come to terms with.
26 2.3. The Epistolary Genre: Women writers and the Creation of a Female Community
Alastair Fowler’s Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (1982) highlights the instability of genres, as they “everywhere change, combine, regroup, or form what seem to be new alignments altogether” (1982: 45). This constant evolution of genres makes it extremely challenging to acutely define or categorise them since if we attempt to do so we inevitably “find ourselves coming to grips with local and temporary groupings, perpetually contending with historical alterations in them” (1982: 45).
Thus, Fowler highlights the extreme significance of understanding the mutability of genres before one endeavours to set the parameters through which they can be identified. When analysing a particular genre, undoubtedly one distinguishes a set of characteristics that are representative, recurrent elements of that genre but, even so, one must bear in mind that such elements certainly alter through time and, as Fowler observes, “the very elements of literature, even the literary model itself are subject to transmutation” (1982: 47).
Recurrent elements, and their possible interpretations, were crucial in psychoanalytical thought. Within this field, Julia Kristeva’s influential work needs to be considered. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (1982), Kristeva offers a definition of abjection, and specifically her claim that it is “co-extensive with social and symbolic order” (1982: 68) also revolves around this notion of women’s enclosure.
Within Kristeva’s psychoanalytical perspective, the feminine, far from being a universal category, becomes the ‘other’, that which is ambiguous, abject. Such ‘otherness’ of the feminine is essential for my thesis, as in all the texts under analysis women struggle to
27 attain a subjectivity they can call their own, a subjectivity that ultimately proves their capacity to assume the control of their own circumstances.
In Kristeva’s work, abjection is always identified as that which “disturbs identity, system, order” (1982: 2) and, hence, as something which clearly does not respect frontiers, set positions or barriers. The abject becomes associated with a tremendously ambiguous element, that which cannot be easily established.
This abject female subject, enclosed within a domestic setting, is forced to resign herself to an imaginary conception of the ‘freedom’ she might acquire, as Kristeva argues this:
... bears witness to women’s desire to lift the weight of what is sacrificial in the social contract from their shoulders, to nourish out societies with a more flexible and free discourse, one able to name what has thus far never been object of circulation in the community: the enigmas of the body, the dreams, secret joys, shames, hatreds of the second sex” (1986: 207)
Kristeva’s argument reflects on the deficiencies of language itself to voice women’s secret longings and urges. Their confined state also contributes to this silencing of their true desires.
Terry Castle’s influential study Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction provides an innovative and radical defence of the Masquerade assembly. Castle recognises the enormous fascination that was generated around the masquerade, which became “an established and ubiquitous feature of urban life” (1986: 1) but she also stresses the high degree of condemnation that such gathering received, especially from moralists, who viewed such assemblies as ‘immoral’ and ‘improper’.
28 One of the main contributions that Castle makes is her ability to display the multiple, often contradictory, possibilities to approach the masquerade as a social and cultural phenomenon. Her interpretation of masquerades as opportunities for a deep exploration of the self and the other provides the ground for the analysis of such public events as the only means through which women’s barriers could be trespassed. Frontiers become blurred in masquerades and prescribed gender roles can therefore be reversed.
Women were usually advised against attending such assemblies precisely because within the imaginative world that the masquerade provides women can transgress and, what is more, they can momentarily release themselves from the social and cultural pressures of their daily lives.
As Castle rightly notes, the main concern about women’s attendance to masquerade events was the fear that such gathering “encouraged female sexual freedom, and beyond that, female emancipation generally” (1986: 33). It can be assumed that the source of anxiety was the belief that, the moment women were permitted to go beyond their expected role and freely behave in ways that would not be allowed in any other circumstance, a turning-point would occur and, perhaps, women would no longer willingly submit themselves to societal pressures and would wish to continue to experience the ‘freedom’ they encountered in the masquerade.
Hence, this potential to subvert and destabilize social and cultural conventions that Castle identifies in the masquerade is very much felt in the fiction of the period, in which the masquerade is always a sign of transgression.
Given the apparent impossibility to transcend social expectations, the public assembly of the masquerade appears to be the most viable option for women to transgress, violate moral and social codes and finally ‘free’ themselves from their restrictions.
29 Another aspect that further complicates women’s attempts to go beyond their prescribed roles is the (social) importance placed on impressions. With regards to women’s role, impressions become critical, as the impression they cause on others amounts to their ‘respectability’. The image they display at the eyes of their society will ultimately determine their adherence to propriety and, hence, their ‘virtue’.
In Fetter’d or Free, Margaret Anne Doody notes, impressions are unstable and all “judgments of prudence are, after all, founded on assumptions and impressions, and this might betray” (1986: 343). This will prove to be the case in one of the texts I analyse in this thesis, Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph, in which appearances prove to be deceitful, as a misreading of the nature of a female character has terrible consequences, as I will discuss later in the chapter devoted to Frances Sheridan.
In the midst of such literary upheaval, Clive T. Probyn’s English Fiction of the Eighteenth Century 1700-1789 (1987), stressed the fact that the principal achievement of the eighteenth-century novel was not so much ameliorating the genre or improving formal elements, but rather the realisation that this novel “examined, for the first time, radical questions of a social, economic, and sexual nature” (1987: 15). Eighteenth- century novels opened up the way for an exploration of crucial aspects that remained deeply unexplored and, for the first time, attempted to provide some insight into those social and cultural elements that determined people’s daily lives and the repercussions that societal pressures and expectations had on individual, especially female, experience.
The novels of the period found means to question “the beliefs and assumptions of the patriarchal order” (Probyn 1987: 98) and by so doing they managed to bring to light the “consequences of female constraint” (Probyn 1987: 98). This is tremendously
30 significant for the purposes of this thesis, as such attempts to dismantle accepted patriarchal ideals that contributed to women’s commodification and subjection allow for a deeper exploration of the extent of women’s limitations and, crucially, a broader visibility of the results produced by patriarchal impositions on women’s daily lives, of what Probyn terms “a dramatic version of the difficulties women encounter as marginalized and often silenced figures of society” (1987: 98).
The epistolary mode became a powerful means through which to give voice to the female experience, to utter in a very direct way the main preoccupations surrounding the female persona. In The Eighteenth Century Novel: From Sentimentalism to Rationalism (1989), Flora Palamidesi notes that in epistolary narrations there is an autobiographic element that augments the sentimentality of the experiences described and brings the narrator closer to its recipient, since "the importance assumed by the narrator suggested the choice of the autobiographic form, which on the other hand responded also to the necessity of giving the reader stories of real people" (1989: int 19).
Through a first-person epistolary narrator, the audience becomes much more involved in the events that are being described and, in the case of a female narrator, the level of identification with her is also heightened because of the palpable immediacy that the epistolary provides.
Elizabeth C. Goldsmith’s contribution in the volume Writing the Female Voice (1989) introduced women as possessors of a unique aptitude for epistolary narration, which derived from their “ability to produce convincing and authentic letters of passion” (1989: 48), despite the fact that they were expected not to produce such passional accounts. The female voice was the chosen vehicle of expression in the epistolary, although this did not always necessarily entail the presence of a female
31 author. The clearest example of this is the fiction of Samuel Richardson, who employed a feminine voice in his acclaimed epistolary novels, Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa (1748), which became clear exponents of the epistolary, models subject to endless imitation.
Patricia Meyers Spacks also contributed in the volume Writing the Female Voice, and she claimed that early epistolary accounts reveal some discomfort with women’s circumstances but, in spite of the presence of this ‘resistance’ attitude, such works nonetheless “implicitly accept the situation as necessary” (1989: 64). Spacks related this early epistolary attempt to introduce the possibility of women achieving some ‘control’ to Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, in which Susan’s narration positions her as a female who seeks authority and exercises her agency “partly by the act of writing letters” (1989: 64). This proves to be the case, as I will argue in my chapter on Frances Brooke, in Lady Anne Wilmot’s narration. Like Lady Susan, Lady Anne is also seeking to attain her authority and exercise some control, exerting a significant amount of female agency.
In epistolary novels, feeling acquires a special significance. In these accounts, the female epistolary narrator relies on feeling to interpret and respond to the events that occur around her and, for her, “feeling constitutes power rather than weakness” (Spacks 1989: 69).
Spacks identifies some anger in these women’s epistolary texts, as in their portrayal of their daily experience, which is limited, “everything is not the best in a world which, from a woman’s point of view, seems far from the best possible” (1989:
72). Their letter writing allows these women to utter their uneasiness with a limiting world that seems unfair to them, a world they are forced to resign to but which is far from ideal. Epistolary accounts permitted women to express some discomfort with their
32 situation and, crucially, to express their willingness to somehow surpass their limitations, a task that proved difficult to accomplish.
Sally Winkle’s contribution to Writing the Female Voice brings forward the suspicion that religious thought also played a part in complicating women’s efforts to surpass their limiting assigned role, since religious theories introduced women as
“defined by nature for her position as a self-effacing, gentle, devoted wife and mother”
(1989: 78). Thus, Winkle’s argument implies that any attempt from women’s part to disobey their ‘natural’ role “was therefore no longer simply unacceptable, but could be denounced as unnatural and degenerate” (1989: 78).
Rosemarie Tong’s Women, Sex and the Law (1989) also reflects on the notion of female transgression but, in his view, such transgression is not to be found in external aspects but rather within the female individual herself. He refers back to feminists’
discomfort with the perpetuation of a “a malignant image of the male-female- relationship” (1989: 99), in which women are depicted as temptresses whose “body is an instrument of evil, and for this she must be punished” (1989: 99). In this case female transgression is not related to attending certain events or to behaving in certain ways but is rather located in the widespread ‘negative’ portrayals of women, as the ones who
‘corrupt’ and tempt males.
Another trope that is usually found in relation to the construction of ‘proper’
femininity and, as such, in direct opposition to the very notion of transgression is the recurring trope of the absent mother, which gains special significance in some of the texts that I will analyse in this thesis. The mother figure, a nurturing presence that shapes her descendants’ process of identity formation, when denied, produces a void that manifests itself in their never ending necessity to remain connected to that (absent) mother figure.
33 Marianne Hirsch’s The Mother/Daughter Plot: Narrative, Psychoanalysis, Feminism (1989) brings attention to the fact that “maternal absence and silence rob the heroine of important role models for her development, of the matriarchal power which could facilitate her own growth into womanhood” (1989: 44). The mother is the one that ought to guide the heroine into the ‘right’ path of her life and help her grow, both physically and emotionally, into the woman she will become. Being denied of this role model, it is assumed, results in the heroine’s loss of her own identity, as she finds herself lost endlessly searching for a mother figure she can never find.
As Hirsch notes, unable to benefit from the nurturing presence of a ‘real’
mother, inevitably, such heroines are forced to find solace in substitute figures, since surrogate mothers and male figures of authority are the only ‘mothers’ they can aspire to. These ideas are in complete accordance with some of the views I will analyse in the chapter devoted to Sophia Lee’s The Recess, a text in which the trope of the absent mother is a recurrent theme.
Enclosed spaces, and the implications for the female characters that inhabit them, is another recurrent theme that acquires a special significance in the fiction of the period. Throughout the long eighteenth century, women became the guardians of the home, embodying a domestic image that preceded that which in the nineteenth century would be termed ‘the angel in the house’. As such, the home became a feminine terrain, a space in which she had the obligation to build a ‘proper’ space for herself and her family.
In The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (1989), Kate Ferguson notes that enclosed places are not always a safe environment but, actually, “the very opposite, a prison” (1985: int xiii). Women’s confinement to the domestic sphere was mirrored in fictional accounts, all of which
34 depicted females who understood that their ‘proper’ place was the home. However, in the Female Gothic, the home is no longer an invulnerable, guarded place but is rather surrounded by perils that trespass its frontiers and access it and, hence, as Ferguson claims in such cases “enclosure becomes not a restraint upon evil but a sign of it”
(1989: 68).
2.4. Resisting the ‘Proper’ Lady Configuration: The Image of the Female Trickster
In the 1990s, there was a growing emphasis on passion. In the previous decades, the cult of sensibility had already established an overt endorsement of sentiments, which nonetheless prevented the display of extreme passionate states.
In Sensibility in Transformation: Creative Resistance to Sentiment from the Augustans to the Romantics: Essays in Honor of Jean H (1990), Syndy McMillen Conger reflects this demand that women exhibit their capacity for deep feeling without expressing too strong emotions was tremendously paradoxical, as women “were acknowledged freely to be men’s superiors in the exercise of feeling, but at the same time they were reminded that excess exhibition of feeling demonstrated weakness of character and inferiority to men” (1990: int 15).
The implication that derives from this is that women ought to openly display emotions but carefully avoiding excessive displays that would compromise their propriety. This careful self-monitoring was a requisite to be recognised as a ‘proper’
woman who knows her place and acts accordingly. Conger notes that a ‘genuinely’
virtuous sensibility is not solely based on women’s acceptance of social mores but also on “the consciousness– individual and uncoerced, yet carefully educated and scrutinized – that one is acting and feeling meritoriously when judged against an ideal standard”
35 (1990: 67). Hence, in order to ‘earn’ the recognition of being truly virtuous, woman ought to fully understand her necessity to adapt her behaviour in all areas of her life so as to make it suitable to the ideal standard against which she is constantly judged against.
The sexual double standard has been repeatedly analysed by critics, who have revolved around the marked differentiation that was established between expected male and female behaviour.
In this respect, Elizabeth Bergen Brophy’s Women’s Lives and the 18th-Century English Novel (1991) revolves around the prevailing assumption that “sexual desire was proper to the male and unbecoming to the female” (1991: 27). Brophy notes that the cultural expectation was that the woman, because of her presumed tendency towards the unreasonable and the sentimental, was much more “vulnerable to sexual temptation”
(1991: 27). This assumed predisposition of females to fall ‘victims’ to their passions was often used to justify the continuous and alert (sexual) monitoring to which women were subjected.
Mary A. Favret’s Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politcs and the Fictions of Letters (1993), introduces the notion that female inner lives could be accessed through letter writing and reading. Their private experience found expression through public means, which dismantled the opposition between private and public, as “the letter typically registered private, interiorized moments – domestic details, closed circles of family and friends, the inner workings of the mind” (1993: 12).
This progression from “private expression to published property pulled the letter out of its fiction of individualism and complicated its ‘feminine’ identity” (Favret 1993:
13). The letter was, by definition, a private document that would only be intercepted by its recipient. This is disrupted through the apparition of the epistolary, through which
36 the private document becomes public knowledge and hence letter-writing ceases to be an individual act and becomes a collective one.
Therefore, as Favret argues, this implied that “the epistolary form was acquiring a public voice: the stories of these fictional individuals and others were the topics of public debate; epistolary characters entered the discourse of the age and became the property of cultural history” (1993: 13).
Laura Brown’s of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1993) reflects upon these same ideas, as Brown identifies the period’s commonplace insistence on identifying “the corruption assigned to the female body and the murderousness attributed to the female figure” (1993: 19). However, interestingly, Brown does not take these widespread assumptions as necessarily putting women at the disadvantage, but actually as those aspects that trigger some sort of resistance because they bring about “the representation of an active female agency”
(Brown 1993: 19). Throughout my thesis, women struggle against widespread social assumptions to which they are expected to willingly submit. Yet, as I will argue in the chapters about the texts, the women depicted in those narratives, though submissive, nonetheless display a certain degree of uneasiness with societal pressures and some resistance to social control is present in the texts, in an implicit way in the case of heroines but in a much more ‘overt’ manner in the case of non-conventional, disruptive female characters.
Brown even notes the presence of some sort of ‘violence’ within women’s subordinate state. Female commodification is introduced as necessary, as a “natural and essential extension of female sexuality” (Brown 1993: 85) but, at the same time, the female body behind that commodification is comprised by the violence it elicits, and it is precisely that violence which becomes “a structural product of the implicit allusion to
37 female power, and thus an ideological assertion of vengeance against the threat of the unruly woman” (Brown 1993: 85).
Brown explores the possibilities that lay behind women’s subordination and commodification and revolves around women’s potential for disruption and resistance against their situation. Their submissive state may very well be the ideal position through which to revolt against their circumstances and become the very unruly, defiant woman they are expected to shun.
Rachel Brownstein’s Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (1994) reflects on the concerns which are constructed around the ideal notion of the heroine. In the process of constructing heroines, many elements come into play, as “to want to be a heroine is to want to be something special, something else, to want to change, to be changed, and also to want to stay the same” (Brownstein 1994: int xv).
Thus, the heroine is not stable a stable category but a constantly changing one, one that includes many – often contradictory – sources of anxiety that move from the desire to explore other possible representations and the wish to retain the essence that is to be embedded to such a characterisation.
The figure of the heroine entails a questioning of the system of values around which it is constructed. Such a figure “explores the connections between the inner self and its outward manifestations - between the personal and the social, the private and the public" (Brownstein 1994: int xix). The heroine carries the ‘weight’ of becoming a perfect role model worthy of imitation and, as such, her inner self must never stand in opposition to the expected outward manifestations of virtuousness she must endorse.
Theoretically, the social, the private and the public must be fused into one, into a perfectly suited entity in which no conflict occurs. Yet, such unison is not always
